Alice Haskell. That girl knew what was good for you, and did it whether you wanted it done or not. "Hey, Charlie, could you hitch a ride out to Ayers Island and bring Kate's truck back on the ferry? Here's the keys. While you're at it, rebuild the bastard from winch to tow-hitch." Probably would have cost less to buy a new truck, but Kate had turned that down. Twice.
So Alice went around to the back door, applying the magical touch of Haskell money. Stopping her was like trying to argue with a glacier.
Kate called it "Haskell money" out of habit, less than a drop in the bucket of a considerable fortune. Alice seemed to think of it more like a trust fund for her tribe, and apparently Kate had become an honorary Naskeag Wabanaki when she moved in with Alice.
Anyway, Alice had handed her back the keys when they both got out of the hospital, done deal. Take it or leave it, and a contractor needed a truck. One that could haul its rated load of a full ton of lumber or Sheetrock for the first time in ten years was a real plus. It even started and stopped when she asked it.
She eased the truck into gear, the clutch smooth and reliable and strange, and used the engine to brake her down the slope, four-wheel-drive and low range engaged. Only a fool explored roads like this faster than a walk. Washouts lurking under drifted leaves, high-centered rocks sitting in ambush, bog holes that looked like innocent puddles from a recent rain — the Maine woods had their ways of eating old roads and careless trucks. And she didn't feel up to limping the miles back to civilization for a tow.
Down in the hollow, those cedars were old, old and tall and straight-grained and heavy with fragrance, and someone should have fed them to a shingle or clapboard mill a century ago. Headed up the far slope, the truck rumbled into a grove of thick-boled white pines that would have left a timber merchant drooling, three and four feet through and the trunks shooting up fifty feet clean to the first limbs.
Hairs stood up on her forearms and the back of her neck. This road was a time-warp into another century. She pulled up to another crest, an opening with mossy old oaks to the south and blueberry barrens rising away to the north, and stopped. Blueberry land usually meant dry fields, sand and gravel and bare rock, should be a safe place to turn the truck. Her odometer and the phone message said there should be a driveway . . . .
She sat and studied the sweep of low bushes red and purple with the touch of autumn, the stone outcrops scattered on the crest, the clear blue sky. Something still set her teeth on edge. There was a lot of commercial blueberry land tucked away in the wilds of Sunrise County, but those roads showed up on the map.
Kate grimaced, shifted, winced again, shifted again — settling into a position that minimized the aches from her hip and shoulder. Wounds from her own gun, fired by her own daughter. Half of the ache was memory. She couldn't forget. Kate shook her head and fumbled for a cigarette.
Jackie. She stood in the middle of the trail ahead, a faint and wavery ghost, tall and muscular with short blonde hair like her mother and grandmother, a teenage scowl glooming her face. Kate kept seeing her daughter around town, all the places she'd used to be, all the places Kate expected her to be. Memories of pain and failure, haunting Kate.
The damnfool child had run away from home. Moved in with friends, Pratts, an old Stonefort family with mucho money from the import/export business. Drugs. Turned out Jackie had been involved in that for years. Not using, selling. Kate had been too busy keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to see the signs.
Alice had gone out to the old Pratt place on separate business of her own, and Kate ended up there because of a vision of fire and death right out of one of Alice's Wagnerian operas. End result, the brat shot Alice in the back, turned and shot her mother, then ran 'round a corner and got her own self killed in a shootout with a rival drug gang. Kate concentrated on lighting the cigarette, hands shaking the flame on her late ex-husband's battered Zippo.
Let's hear it for the modern American family.
The first cigarette in an hour or so, she drew deep and held the nicotine in her lungs like the kids held each toke of their demon Weed. She couldn't smoke in the House, Alice's house.
Not that Alice told her she couldn't. She'd quit her nagging when Kate moved in, dropped her standard RN's coffin-nail rant about the threats of lung cancer and heart disease and yellow-stained teeth and smoker's breath in their kisses. Not that there'd been much of that, the condition both of them were in.
And the House didn't seem to mind her smoking, either. Rather otherwise. That was the problem.
The House, the Haskell House, ancient home of the Haskell Witches, much more aware than any pile of stone and wood ought to be and with some very strong opinions on the way the world should work, seemed to consider tobacco sacred. And anyone who crossed its worn oak threshold lived by the House's rules. It had unpleasant ways to enforce them.
Sure, Kate could light up a cigarette any time she wanted. As long as she offered smoke to the four winds and to the spirits of earth and water and sky, that is, and muttered some phrases in Naskeag that she half understood. And then dealt with the
